Please see the Author Instructions in this section. 

General

Papers must be clearly written in English. A recent issue of the journal should be consulted for style. Units, symbols and related matters are based on the CBE Manual Scientific Style and Format (6th Edition, 1994, ISBN 0-521-47154-0).

The main file needs to be double-spaced with continuous line numbering and pagination on A4 paper. The text is to be in Word (pdf files of the main text not accepted) in a common 12-point font such as Arial. The first (title) page must include author names (capitals) and full addresses where the work was carried out, with the corresponding author’s email address and any current address if different.

The Abstract needs to succinctly express the context, purpose, approach, findings and implications of the paper, and includes no literature citations or unexplained abbreviations. Each Table(s) and Figure(s) should be loaded as separate files; format details are provided below. Authors should put supporting Figures, Tables and text into Supplementary Materials (see below). Footnotes are not used in the Environmental Conservation. 

Spelling and Language Editing

Before submitting your manuscript you may wish to have it edited for language, particularly if English is not your first language. Authors are liable for all costs associated with such services. Spelling should conform to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th edition or later. Scientific names of genera, species and subspecies, but not of higher groups should be italicized. Non-English terms should be italicized at their first mention, where they also must be defined and explained, but thereafter may be written in normal typeface.

Units and Abbreviations

The International System of units (SI) is to be used. Units, symbols and related matters are based on the CBE Manual Scientific Style and Format (6th Edition, 1994, ISBN 0-521-47154-0). Acronyms and abbreviations are generally in upper case and should be expanded at the first mention. All currencies should at first mention have a US$ exchange rate (e.g. '£1 = US$1.20, January 2015).

References and citations

References to cited literature will be those essential to validate statements or arguments.  All references are to be in alphabetical order at the end of the paper, and the reader must be provided with the information necessary to find the item cited.  

Journal papers with no more than seven authors (if more than seven then use ‘et al.’ for the remaining authorship) are to be referenced as follows:

• Smith EJ, Jones MS, Brothers PT (2017) How to write an interdisciplinary environmental paper. Environmental Conservation 44: 120-125.

Book chapters will be referenced as follows:

• Smith EJ (2011) Writing robust environmental science. In: The Science of Effective Scientific Writing, ed. MS Jones, pp. 111-22. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

References to World Wide Web material (official sites only and those without charge to readers) are expected to be kept to a minimum and will be of the form: 

• Jones MS (2010) Communicating interdisciplinary environmental science. URL www.foundationforec.org

Within-text literature citations (in chronological order where more than one; first author only with ‘et al.’ where more than two authors) will take the following form:

• ‘This has been observed elsewhere (Jones 2006, Jones & Smith 2007, Smith et al. 2009)’

Citations of unpublished information not in the references should take the form:

• '(EJ Smith, unpublished 2010)' or ‘(MS Jones, personal communication 2011)'.

Where an author, or the same group of authors, has written more than one paper in the same year, these should be distinguished by the letters a, b, c, etc., in the order in which they are mentioned in the text. Do not use such terms as 'op. cit.' or 'ibid'.

For those that use Endnote, you can find the style guide for ENC here.

Required Statements

These statements are to be included on the paper after the main body of the article, and before the references.

Acknowledgements

You may acknowledge individuals or organizations that provided advice or non-financial support. Formal financial support and funding should be listed in the following section.

Financial support

Please provide concise details of the sources of financial support for all authors, including grant numbers. For example, "This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (MSJ) and the Natural Environment Research Council (EJS)". Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: "This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors." 

Conflict of interest

Please provide details of all known financial, professional and personal relationships with the potential to bias the work. Where no known conflicts of interest exist, please include the following statement: "None."

Ethical standards

Authors should ensure that any studies involving human or animal subjects conform to national, local and institutional laws and requirements (e.g. WMA Declaration of Helsinki, NIH Policy on Use of laboratory Animals, EU Directive on Use of Animals) and confirm that approval has been sought and obtained where appropriate. Authors should obtain express permission from human subjects and respect their privacy. This includes use of monitoring devices that could collect data on people (e.g. drones, camera traps, audio recorders) and use of data on people's behaviour or opinions derived from social media or other technologies, where the research needs to be conducted in a socially responsible manner.

Where research involves human and/or animal experimentation, the following statements should be included (as applicable): "The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with applicable ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008" and/or "The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with applicable national and institutional ethical guidelines on the care and use of laboratory or otherwise regulated animals". If not applicable, please include the following statement: "None"

Figures (number limit: three for Subject Reviews, Research Papers and Perspectives; two for Reports; one for Comments)

Figures accepted for publication in colour will, where justified, be published in colour online at no cost. All Figures must be essential to the paper’s objectives. 

Figures are all to be referred to in the text and numbered consecutively (e.g. Fig. 1), each to be supplied in its own file separate from the main body of the text, with Figure positions marked within the main text. 

Figures should not be framed and as simple as possible; omit non-essential detail. Avoid stippling and unusual symbols, which cannot be reproduced satisfactorily when reduced to one (84mm) or two- column width (175mm). Where various shadings are used within a Figure please ensure that it is easy to differentiate between them. Line charts, bar charts and pie charts should be two- dimensional. 

Labels on Figures should be brief and explained in the legend. Preferred symbols are open and filled circles, boxes and triangles, and these should be used consistently between Figures and as near as possible to 9 point when reproduced in the final journal.

Figure legends are to be in a list at the end of the References and must make the Figure comprehensible without reference to the main text. Any abbreviations, symbols, scales or units used in Figures must be explained in the legend, in a key within the Figure or in another Table or Figure legend. Maps must have scales and photographs should include an indication of scale. Figures reproduced from other sources are to be fully acknowledged in the legend, and permission for their reproduction in electronic format sought before use. 

Figure file requirements are as follows:

Line illustrations (images with distinct straight and/or curved lines on a plain background, without gradations in shade or colour, see example below). 

Required format: eps or as a pdf from the original source software. Only use line weights > 0.3 pt at final size, prominent lines (e.g. plot lines on graphs), should be approximately 1 pt. Mathematics labels to be typed exactly as they appear in the text. If you have no option but to supply as a bitmap image (e.g. jpeg, tiff etc), please supply as 1200 dpi but warning: line work supplied as bitmap will lose quality in production.

Halftone illustrations (images with continuous tone, such as photographs, can be colour or black and white, see example below)

Required format tif or jpeg, file saved at minimum resolution of 300 dpi. Use patterns or textures within black where possible instead of shading to differentiate areas of the figure. 

Combination illustrations (images with both continuous tone and line/vector elements (e.g. photo with scale bar, can be colour or black and white, see example below)

Required format eps (if not possible, as pdf from the original source software). If you have no option but to supply as a bitmap image (e.g. jpeg, tiff etc), please supply as 600 dpi but warning: line work supplied as bitmap will lose quality in production.

Further guidance on preparing Figures can be found in Fisher, M. (2016) Graphics for Conservation: How to illustrate your story.(http://scalar.usc.edu/works/graphics-for-conservation).

Tables (number limit: three for Subject Reviews, Research Papers and Perspectives; two for Reports; one for Comments)

Tables are to be submitted in MS Word or Excel format, and presented one per file, complete with heading. They should be uploaded separately from the main body of the text, with their approximate final positions indicated in the text. Tables should be suitable for production well within a single journal page. Table captions should be brief and ensure the Table is comprehensible without reference to the text. They should incorporate any scale, key, unit or symbol information necessary to interpret the data. 

Submission

Please use the following instructions to supply supplementary material to accompany the online version of your article:

1. Each supplementary file must be supplied as a separate file. Do not supply this material as part of the file destined for publication in the print journal.

2. Each supplementary file must have a clear title (e.g., Figure S1).

3. Provide a text summary for each file of no more than 50 words. The summary should describe the contents of the file. Descriptions of individual figures or tables should be provided if these items are submitted as separate files. If a group of figures is submitted together in one file, the description should indicate how many figures are contained within the file and provide a general description of what the figures collectively show.

4. The file type and file size in parentheses.

5. Ensure that each piece of supplementary material is clearly referred to at least once in the print version of the paper at an appropriate point in the text, using the format ‘Table S1’ (for Tables), ‘Figure S2’ (for Figures), with other relevant materials (for example questionnaires, programming code) cited as ‘Appendix S1’, and is also listed at the end of the paper before the reference section.

6. A statement must be added before the acknowledgments section of the manuscript, an example is shown below:

Supplementary material

For supplementary material accompanying this paper, visit www.cambridge.org/core/journals/environmental-conservation

7. Supplementary Materials like the paper itself will not be alterable once the paper has been accepted, and authors will not be sent proofs of this material. The authors should understand that they bear whole responsibility for this content.

Format and file size

• File sizes should be as small as possible in order to ensure that users can download them quickly.
• Images should be a maximum size of 640 x 480 pixels at a resolution of 72 pixels per inch.
• Authors should limit the number of files to under ten, with a total size not normally exceeding 3 MB. Sound/movie files may be up to 10 MB per file; colour PDFs/PowerPoint may be up to 5 MB per file; all other general file types may be up to 2 MB per file but most files should be much smaller.
• We accept files in any of the following formats (if in doubt please enquire first): MS Word document (.doc) , Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Plain ASCII text (.txt), Rich Text Format (.rtf), WordPerfect document (.wpd), HTML document (.htm), MS Excel spreadsheet (.xls), GIF image (.gif), JPEG image (.jpg), TIFF image (.tif), MS PowerPoint slide (.ppt), QuickTime movie (.mov), Audio file (.wav), Audio file (.mp3), MPEG/MPG animation (.mpg)

If your file sizes exceed these limits or if you cannot submit in these formats, please seek advice from the editor handling your manuscript.

Open access publication

Cambridge Open Option allows authors the option to make their articles freely available to everyone, immediately on publication. This service reflects Cambridge Core’s commitment to further the dissemination of published academic information.

The programme allows authors to make their article freely available in exchange for a one-off charge paid either by the authors themselves or by their associated funding body. This fee covers the costs associated with the publication process from peer review, through copyediting and typesetting, up to and including the hosting of the definitive version of the published article online. Payment of this one-off fee entitles permanent archiving both by Cambridge University Press and by the author; however, it also enables anyone else to view, search and download an article for personal and non-commercial use. The only condition for this is that the author and original source are properly acknowledged. 

You may be eligible for a waiver or discount, for example if your institution is part of a Read and Publish sales agreement with Cambridge University Press.

The Cambridge Open Option is only offered to authors upon acceptance of an article for publication and as such has no influence on the peer review or acceptance procedure. The paper will continue to be made available in both print and online versions, but will be made freely available to anyone with Internet links via our online platform, Cambridge Core. In addition, such papers will have copyright assigned under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which enables sharing and adaptation, providing attribution is given. All articles will continue to be handled in the normal manner with peer-review, professional production and online distribution in Cambridge Core. Articles will also be included in the relevant Abstracting & Indexing services and in CrossRef, and can have supplementary content (text, video or audio) added to their online versions. Cambridge Core will also deposit the article in any relevant repositories on the author’s behalf, where that is a condition of the funding body.

The Cambridge Open Option is now available to authors of articles in Environmental Conservation. Requests to take up the Cambridge Open Option will be subject to approval by the Editors of the Journal. For more information on Open Access and Cambridge Journals, please follow this link. For more information about the benefits of choosing to publish Open Access, see here.